s X-NEWS: spcvxb alt.folklore.computers: 4120Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.0 10/3/90 VAX/VMS V5.3; site spcvxb.spc.edu D Path: spcvxb.spc.edu!njin!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!emory!dscatl!lindsay" Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers% Subject: Tame computer language names  Message-ID: <31608@dscatl.UUCP> - From: lindsay@dscatl.UUCP (Lindsay Cleveland)  Date: 8 Oct 90 01:09:42 GMT 1 Reply-To: lindsay@dscatl.UUCP (Lindsay Cleveland) . Organization: Digital Systems Co,  Atlanta, Ga	 Lines: 64   ) To drop a mildly humorous item in here...   D In 1966 I was a Research Associate in the Department of EpidemiologyE at the School of Public Health (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) D We had our usual flock of students with their feverishly-keypunched ? card decks containing encoded responses from their surveys and   questionnaires.   ? As you may well suspect, there were many errors buried in their H data, so I took it upon myself to create a program which would interpretC the various codes in their punched cards (with only 80 columns, one @ tended to get very "cute" when encoding information), check eachB data field for valid values, and translate it into a "longer" dataE record which could then be fed into the various "canned" statistical  > packages.   This wonderful tool was called (in case you didn't already see it coming)....       Epidemiology     Department     Interpretive     Translator   ("EDIT" for short)  & But that's not the end of the story...  = It seems there was a rather large study performed a few years @ before I arrived.  More than one student obtained his Ph.D. from; the great insights and wisdom extracted from the results of : this study, and they only had "primitive" card sorters andB tabulating machines to work with.  Then came along another student= whose research topic required that he use the many drawers of B punched cards from this massive study, but he had the advantage of> using a computer to quickly give him many correlations between various fields.     ; When he started getting some strange "blips" outside of the ? expected curves, he went digging to find what was causing them. / Among other things, he found data cards giving:   '   - a 350-pound man who was 3 feet tall 6   - a 12-year-old man who began menstruating at age 26:   - a 90-year-old woman who had given birth to 30 children  > You get the idea!  And this was the supporting information for& learned articles long-since published!  C So he ran the entire multi-drawer card file through EDIT, went back @ to the original paper questionnaire forms, corrected the errors,2 and *then* was able to proceed with his own study.  A The next day after the story of the "published bad data" made the C rounds of the Department, the following appeared on the door to the . room with all the cabinets of punched cards...  !       Never trust another's data.        EDIT now, or suffa latah!    Cheers, 	   Lindsay   ; Lindsay Cleveland         Digital Systems Co.   Atlanta, Ga *   gatech!dscatl!lindsay     (404) 497-1902E                          (U.S. Mail:  PO Box 1149, Duluth, GA  30136) 